Investigating Online Community Engagement through Stancetaking

Jai Aggarwal, Brian Diep, Julia Watson, Suzanne Stevenson

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

Keywords: stancetaking; community variation; sociolinguistics; community identity

Abstract: Much work has explored lexical and semantic variation in online communities, and drawn connections to community identity and user engagement patterns. Communities also express identity through the sociolinguistic concept of stancetaking. Large-scale computational work on stancetaking has explored community similarities in their preferences for stance markers -- words that serve to indicate aspects of a speaker's stance -- without considering the stance-relevant properties of the contexts in which stance markers are used. We propose representations of stance contexts for 1798 Reddit communities and show how they capture community identity patterns distinct from textual or marker similarity measures. We also relate our stance context representations to broader inter- and intra-community engagement patterns, including cross-community posting patterns and social network properties of communities. Our findings highlight the strengths of using rich properties of stance as a way of revealing community identity and engagement patterns in online multi-community spaces.

Submission Number: 4202